Donald Trump's Twitter habits tell us a lot about his first 100 days as president

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Donald Trump's Twitter habits have long been a source of fascination for millions, and they're now providing an insight into how the Commander in Chief's life has changed since he took office.

Trump's Twitter feed is characterised by its unusual frankness, with many a headline being written based on his 140-character outbursts.

On April 29 it will have been 100 days since Trump's inauguration in Washington and the President's changing use of Twitter can give us a surprising amount of information into how his Presidency is going.

When he was running as a candidate just 17 per cent of @realDonald Trump's tweets were sent out between 5am and 9am. As President the figure has risen to 39 per cent.

We all know it's dangerous to burn the candle at both ends and so it seems does Trump. As a candidate nearly one in three of his tweets were sent after 8pm but as President this has fallen to fewer than one in 10.

We performed a basic sentiment analysis* of his tweets since October 2016 and found that levels of angry and fearful words dipped after election day before picking up again after inauguration day.

Life on the campaign trail is a battle, but it seems Trump is finding he needs to deploy an equally aggressive tone to his life in government. If your flagship policies of banning immigrants from Muslim-majority nations and repealing (and replacing) Obamacare fell-through, you'd probably be annoyed as well.

Interestingly, while the tone of the tweets has resumed to pre-election levels the proportion of capital letter contained therein has remained low. Pre-election, one in 10 characters were capitalised. Post-election it fell to seven per cent and post inauguration it has fallen to 6.8 per cent.

Trump has accepted the need to get a new phone

Of course, it would be foolish to think that every tweet from @realDonaldTrump came from the President himself. As with any big public figure it is likely that his staff also have a say in the content that gets sent out.

An analysis of Trump's tweets prior to his election found that it was easy to tell which tweets actually came from him by looking at the device used to send them.

Tweets from Android devices tended to be a lot angrier than those sent from iPhone devices and this was deemed to be the dividing line between Trump's fiery missives and the more measured tones of his campaign team.

This caused some unexpected grief due to the fact that the Android device in question was an off-the-shelf product, not secure enough for the sensitive office of President.

Despite this fact Trump was still using the Android for more than a month after moving into the White House.

Before March as many as seven out of 10 tweets sent by the President's personal account came from an Android device. However from March onwards Trump has been using his new iPhone with nine out of ten tweets coming from this device and none from an Android phone since March 25.

On this, if little else, Trump has compromised.

How has the content of Trump's tweets changed?

The content of Trump's tweets has changed fairly dramatically since taking office with one of his new obsessions being the media. Particularly those branches of the media (CNN, The New York Times, The BBC etc.) he has labelled as fake news.

Trump has used the word media 29 times since taking office which is four times more often than he did before winning the election on a per month basis.

Use of the word "news" has increased fourfold over the same period with it being preceded by the word "fake" on 27 of the 36 instances it has been employed since inauguration.

Another word Trump is using a lot more since starting the new job is "job". This is likely due to the fact that US unemployment figures have been reaching record lows in recent weeks. It's one of the few positives Trump has on his short record.

While these words have risen in prominence, others have plummeted out of sight.

One of his key campaign slogans to #draintheswamp - his most used hashtag since October - hasn't been tweeted since before the election.

The same can be said for #bigleaguetruth while #maga (make America great again) has only been wheeled out five times since he came to power. References to Hillary Clinton have also tailed off significantly since last November.

Some things never change though. Trump's most used, non-filler word on Twitter since his inauguration is 'great' (72 uses).

*Sentiment analysis is a type of text analysis whereby words are associated with the emotions they connote in order to get a sense of the tone of the text being analysed. We used the NRC lexicon - essentially a big dictionary of words with their associated emotions. Words can have multiple associated emotions. For instance the word 'accused' has three associated emotions: anger, negativity and fear.